Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Eve Online - An Update

OK, my first piece of coursework for the masters course I've started is due in on Friday, and I also have a product releasing to user acceptance testing the same day, so I've been a bit busy.  But here is an update.  I'll do the linking-to-my-sources bit when I get a chance.

Basically, CCP have been denying everything.  Even the bits they concede are true (everything bar the CCP Sharkbait claims), they deny.  The events are rigged, but hey, they're not rigged.  The devs are Best Friends Forever with BoB members and give them advanced notice of upcoming game features, but Iceland is a lonely rock where it's usually dark, and Devs need friends too!

The denials are one thing, but another is that they have threatened to sue any players who continue to claim that they are cheating.  This, of course, is a prime example of a SLAPP: a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.  This is where a company threatens an individual with legal action in order to silence that individual, relying on their greater resources to bluff the individual into backing down, despite the lack of legal merits of the case.

Goonfleet is full of lawyers.  However, CCP's tactic has apparently worked: our leader has quit and cancelled his accounts in disgust.  The new leadership has taken a more passive-aggressive line, as can be seen in this reply to CCP.  The letter is still damning of CCP's attitudes, but has retreated to more defensible lines and adopted a more conciliatory voice.  The hope is that we can force CCP to act professionally and remove its links to BoB members: the biggest complaint and the one most convincingly proven of the three.

Anyway, there has been a thread on F13 for months updating people on CCP's constant scandals and cheating.  That says something in itself!  But one new poster there recently tried to explain, in sociological and cultural terms, why many of us get so upset while CCP refuse to even accept that a problem exists, or to deal firmly with those of their employees (like T20), who are unequivocally proven to cheat and to favour their friends in BoB:

Keep in mind what Iceland is. It's an expanding rock with a lot of fish around it and one big city.  Ninety-six percent of its inhabitants belong to a single religious denomination. (Evangelical Lutheran, fyi!) When you live in this kind of hardtack land, you get an ingrained sense of cultural interdependence. There's so little habitable land in Iceland that if you have a disagreement, or break some rules, or whatever, you can't just up and move away. You can't be a singular unit - you have to interact with others, make deals with them, smooth things over, just make things work. You don't burn any bridges because odds are you're going to have to cross that bridge again.

In [North America], we can write off people no problem. You're in Cali and going to lose your house because you got fired? Move to Nevada and restart your life as a fry cook. In Iceland it's not so easy. The community is so intermingled and isolated that firing/blackballing/shaming someone not only creates much more relative trauma in their life, but creates more backlash on you. So the natural response when these kind of bad things surface is to look at the elements of good and worth - instead of the singular black marks that get you termed in the U.S. - and fix the environment, not the person. CCP, as a company, seems to follow my hypothesis pretty well.

Members of BoB, as stated earlier, have been very helpful to CCP in some endeavours and no doubt CCP appreciates this and communicates with those people in what we in NA consider wholly inappropriate because they're in the same boat - pulling the same rope - etc. In a sense, they're much more part of the team than the pole's length that NA companies expect between customer and vendor. As far as what NA customers expect, it's wholly incestuous. This isn't bad or wrong, but it IS different. When Goonfleet comes in, offering nothing of value and tearing down people that have been part of the team socially, verbally, in-game, etc., CCP's individuals tolerate them only as much as they have to. CCP's response clearly shows they could absolutely care less if every GF desubbed right now. Assuming my hypotheses are correct, not knowing this leads to some pretty ugly stuff, as we've seen.

EVE is a microcosm of Iceland itself, even. It was designed to force interdependence, in fact, it's by far the most interdependent game world in existence right now. To CCP, the notion of Pax BoB probably isn't as abhorrent as it is to NA customers, and thus they feel comfortable sending the only other major force in EVE up the river.

And again, please note that I don't think of this as bad or wrong; it's just a different way of doing things than what NA customers expect. But since CCP relies on NA customers, they're either going to have to trim their playerbase down to people who are OK with this way of thinking or become, well, Blizzard. No pun intended.

There is, necessarily, a degree of simplification there, but I find it to be a good description of at least a factor in the equation.  Another factor, of course, is "small company owned largely by their staff who are hard to fire for cheating".